From: athe nonrex (athenonrex@godisdead.com)
Date: Mon Jun 23 2003 - 02:44:50 MDT
hehe, rather interesting....
i especially like the references to Schrodinger's Cat (a discordian
style book) and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal...
i don't think that i've really heard those angel before...
very creative way of making someone question reality as we know it...
i salute you with a rubber chicken! (cliche, but classic)
-athenonrex
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#~every villan is the hero of his own story~#
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--- Walter Watts <wlwatts@cox.net> wrote:
>The following post from Eric Boyd is almost 3 years old. 10/2000 was the
>original post. It's still a beaut.
>
>Hey Eric, say Hi once in a while.......
>
>Walter
>-------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Dear Church of Virus,
>
>Thought I'd pass along a little thought project that I acquired in Palo
>Alto, from none other than Marvin Minsky...
>
>Do we live in a simulated universe?
>
>If we did, what should we expect to see? Are there any tell tale signs
>that might give its simulated nature away?
>
>Well, for one, a simulated universe should have limits to the precision
>that the calculations contain; i.e. there should be a least significant
>digit. There should also be a biggest number, where the chosen variable
>type maxes out... Finally, to save CPU cycles, there should be shortcuts
>and optimizations -- the programmers don't want to have to sim
>everything (that's expensive), only the necessary things.
>
>Now here's the scary part... doesn't Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
>and quantization in general look an awful lot like a least significant
>digit -- a "truncation error" in the math of the universe? And doesn't
>special relativity's limit on the speed of light look specifically
>designed to avoid overflow errors? (you can't reach the biggest number
>because the closer you get the harder it becomes to get closer...) And
>the cincher -- the whole issue of Schrodinger's Cat, and the
>indeterminacy of quantum events, looks suspiciously like a shortcut
>-- why sim the cat when you can just wait and then evaluate a simple
>probability function when somebody looks? In short, the laws of physics
>as we know them seem to have certain features which would make the
>simulation of our universe a lot easier than one might a-priori
>expect...
>
>It's not proof, of course, but it does get you thinking... if we are
>simulated, what do you suppose the purpose of the simulation is?
>
>Here's an interesting idea that I got from an astrophysics friend of
>mine -- we could test if our universe is simulated by simulating a
>universe ourselves. Basically, whatever hardware it is that does the
>simulating at the top level has to be limited -- and if we can break
>that limit, our own universe will either have "brown outs" -- which we
>could observe -- or we'd simply crash (that being very bad). To prevent
>this, I'm betting that the sys admins would simply prevent our simulated
>universe from actually running; so our inability to sim our universe
>despite the fact that it seems to be doable would be evidence that we
>are ourselves simulations.
>
>Here's an interesting thought: we might conceivably reach the CPU limit
>even without a project so bold as a universe simulation. Any bets on how
>many humans and/or computers would be required to give The Machine a run
>for it's money? Maybe we should limit human numbers to avoid stressing
>the hardware of the universe... <laughs>
>
>----- Eric Boyd
>eric@javien.com
>http://www.lucifer.com/~eboyd/
>When we take things for granted, we take them away from *ourselves*
>
>
>
>--
>
>Walter Watts
>Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
>
>"Reminding you to help control the human population. Have your sexual
>partner spayed or neutered."
>
>
>---
>To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
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